bruno cuconato claro – entry no. 1 (on Tolstoy/Greer)

In his epilogue to his masterpiece, Tolstoy presents what could be called a general theory of the human condition.  It is full of analogies, repetitions, contradictions, and tautologies, but among what readers usually find the most boring part of the novel Tolstoy manages to reach interesting conclusions.  A central remark of the epilogue is “the subject matter of history is the life of peoples and humanity.”  From this follows that the perfect historiography would scrutinize every human being, combining each dream, each passion, each fear, and each desire in a true account of what is past.

Other important contributions by Tolstoy are his hatred for war (“throughout this twenty-year period vast number of fields go unploughed, houses are burnt down, trade flows in different directions, millions of men grow poor, get rich or migrate, and millions of good Christian folk who claim to love their neighbour go about murdering each other.”) and his critic to the historiography of the time, which focused its attention in some chosen individuals (the so-called “great people”) & regions (“that little corner of the world known as Europe,”) and which presupposed an ultimate goal to humanity.  Although his critic to historiography is correct in aim, Tolstoy employs untruthful analogies to prove his point (his scientific analogies are especially prone to decay, as the advance of science has rendered some of them illogical.)  In the analogy of the bee, Tolstoy states that every individual has a different view about the ‘purpose’ of the bee, but that its ‘ultimate purpose’ is “beyond comprehension,” just as “the purposes of historical characters and nations.”  The former statement doesn’t follow from the other, however, except if taken as a dogma.  From the analogy of the railway engine, Tolstoy concludes – again illogically – that the “only concept capable of explaining the movements of nations is the concept of a force that equates to the entire movement of the nations.”  Again, Tolstoy may be right about the goal of his critic, but is wrong in the way he develops it.  Force is a concept in physics, and he can’t employ it in history without defining it (“how many Newtons has Louis XVI contributed to the outburst french revolution?”)  Even if his opinion makes sense, we have no way of measuring if the forces presented by historians as ‘causes’ are equal to what Tolstoy calls “the movement of nations;” therefore, his statement is a fallacy.  

Tolstoy’s contribution to the concept of power is a welcome one.  His challenge of the historiography of the time is based on the inadequacy of representing all the wealth of human actions by telling the story of a few ‘great people’: “the activities of the millions who uproot themselves, burn their houses down, abandon the fields and go off to butcher each other never find expression in the descriptions of activities limited to a dozen personalities who don’t happen to burn houses down, work the soil or kill their fellow creatures.”  Tolstoy calls for a more adequate conception of power and the manifestations of power (i.e. the orders), questioning the dependence of the relationship between orders and events.   

In her article, Greer summarizes the arguments contained in the epilogue to War and Peace in a somewhat positive view, trying to excuse Tolstoy of his contradictions and digressions.  There is no basis to Tolstoy’s call for the renouncement of freedom, for as pointed out by Greer herself, “the reasoning that carries us toward this conclusion is anything but conclusive.”  Greer’s call for a Tolstoyan history of the Arab Spring, though, makes sense.  History being guided by the composite will of every individual, leaders have been necessary to the success of political movements because of their roles as articulators (“Kings are the slaves of history,” Greer quotes.)  As Tolstoy shows, leaders are not perfect manifestations of the will of the people.  The advent of the internet, however, may be eliminating the need for leaders in political movements, as people are now capable of more easily expressing themselves to a greater number of other people, and also of articulating themselves.  If the internet renders possible (not ‘causes’) leaderless movements, as it seems to be doing in the Arab Spring (and in the Turkish and Brazilian protests of last year,) the old historiography criticized by Tolstoy will lose its remaining credibility.

Greer tries to justify the existence of the epilogue to War and Peace, despite several critics to it and demands that it should have been erased. Alex Castro, a contemporary Brazilian author, has one sole rule for creative writing: “always erase your favourite passage, chapter, or scene of your own work.”  The reasoning behind this is that the favourite passage of an author is inevitably the passage where he shows off his wit instead of telling the story.  Castro, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Lubbock would all agree that the epilogue and the passages narrated by what Greer calls “the essayistic voice” were certainly among Tolstoy’s favourite passages.